We're having a heat wave...

(It's really hard not to finish the line, isn't it? So, okay, all together: "...a tropical heat wave.")

And we really are. After a June with temps in the 80s for highs and enough rain to turn off the sprinkler system, July came a little closer to being normal, and now August is typical. Typical only in its 100+ days; atypical in that they've just now started.

Every time I listen to the weather, they report the normals, highs and lows. What has struck me is the number of highs set in the year I was born. In August.

With no a/c and pregnant-out-to-there with me, my mother must have been at her most miserable. That she repeated the feat two years later with my sister is a testament to her will to "family plan" rather than any suffering she would do with a toddler and in the heat.

I've rarely had sympathy for any of my mother's health problems (she died ten summers ago of kidney failure due to a heart that couldn't pump efficiently due to ignoring what was best for her health). I've felt she brought most of them on herself. She was loathe to exercise, ate what she pleased (all of it fried), and in later years, ignored the doctor's advice that she was on the verge of diabetes brought on by obesity. I think in her last months she had a few regrets or the fact of her mortality snuck up on her, one, because her attitude changed just the slightest bit.

But think of her pregnant with temperatures over one hundred--records still standing after more than half a century--and I do feel sorry for her.

Bless your heart, Mother, for all the complaining you ever did, you never mentioned it.